Cabaret Voltaire

Cabaret Voltaire

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Cabaret Voltaire

Cabaret Voltaire is a Zurich café. It witnessed the birth and expression of the Dada movement in creative, shameless, and decidedly scandalous events.

Dada was a movement of “liberation of the artist,” a movement that sought to break with everything established, and it was even called “anti-art.” Its own phrase is self-explanatory: “Nothing was sacred. We spit on everything.”

The Cabaret was founded in 1916, a time in which the worst horrors of the First World War were being experienced and many artists were refugees in Zurich. It was not a coincidence that this Swiss café became the epicenter of one of the avant-garde movements, since as reality was absurd and tragic, there was a pressing need to re-found everything, to make a new art for a new world.

The Dadaist Manifesto was presented in this café and multidisciplinary art events were held, pioneers of the performance art that would reach its peak in the sixties.

Meaningless poetry, meaningless discussions, howling, euphoria, uncoordinated and rhythmless dances, intuition, spontaneity, creative chaos. Expressions where anything can be found except a certain logic.

The great thing is that Dadaist artists not only made fun of “bourgeois” art, but they also made fun of their own art —it could not be otherwise— which they considered to be “the same shit, but they wanted to shit in different colors,” and they were going to “adorn the zoo of art.”

Cabaret Voltaire is a minimum universe of absolute freedom. A place where everyone “dances to his own personal boomboom,” according to the Dadaist manifesto. Of course, it was closed six months after its inauguration.

Today, it is a cultural center with an important library on Dadaism. You can read during the day, and at night there is a bar where artistic events are held and art is debated.

Image: Hugo Ball reciting poetry at Cabaret Voltaire (1916)

Recommended links:

Dada.

Fountain (1917), by Marcel Duchamp.

The “Avant-garde” Movements.

Hannah Höch.

Surrealism.

Psychic automatism.

When does Modern Art Start?

The Return to Order.

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